“Give up rough pastimes,” Anne Boleyn warmly advises her too-ardent suitor Henry VIII in Howard Brenton’s shrewd, funny, drop-dead inventive account of her rise and decapitating fall from grace. “But that’s what life is, Lady Anne!” the king responds, growing more infatuated with her, and more respectful too, by the second. “A rough pastime: hunt, sing, dance, make war, make love. That’s where my heart is set.” And that’s where this captivating new play’s heart is set too: it runs with the Tudor pack at its most snarling, scheming, ribald, pleasure-seeking and gaily entertaining. It takes the tame conventions of historical drama and hurls them in the privy. There are jokes here about quack contraceptive devices, new-improved portable racks - even an end of Act One gag that sees Anne, after years of awaiting the permitted moment of conjugal satisfaction, shoo away the audience for the interval so she and Henry can get down to it.

You could call it a cheeky answer to Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. It aspires to the Bard’s poetic touch, though, as well as his wit. At its core, it shows us a man and a woman in love whose mutuality will be ripped asunder by the merciless requirements of monarchical heredity. And yet it argues for Anne’s story to be read not as textbook tragedy but as something far more uplifting. Even though she failed to provide that much-needed male heir, Boleyn, as much for reasons of self-advancement as out of reformist religious belief, assisted in the birth of the Church of England. She suffered death but lives on; not a saint, maybe, but no sinner either.

There is, yes, a surfeit of ambition here. Like some elaborate, groaning pastry at a Tudor feast, Brenton crams not one but two eras into his hurly-burly entertainment. The night belongs to James I, too, pondering what to do about religion and drawing inspiration from a discovered copy of Tyndale’s New Testament, a legacy of Anne’s fervent, if furtive, promotion of the radical Protestant. He looks to the future and a new version of the Bible while glancing back at the past and pondering Boleyn.

It only just hangs together. The performances, though, in John Dove’s ebullient, zesty production keep your eye off the flaws, moving between periods and serving the switches between arch politicking and Blackadder-ish flourishes with equal aplomb. Brenton, one suspects, fell in love with his subject - and it’s hard not to do so before Miranda Raison’s radiant, intelligent, beautiful Anne. She’s able to consort and flirt with the audience at close-range thanks to Michael Taylor’s pleasing design, which thrusts a wooden walkway out into the courtyard area. Among the rest of the cast, Anthony Howell makes for a dashing, dishy Henry VIII, James Garnon is terrific as James I, comically afflicted with Tourette’s-like seizures, while Colin Hurley is a memorably fat and sly Cardinal Wolsey. The poor usurped Catherine of Aragon is curiously absent. Another play there, too? Bring it on!